posted on 11 Jan 2023

Bertie and the Alien Chicken by Jenny Pearson

I couldn’t help but sympathise with poor Bertie. I know that if I was forced to take my holidays with an uncle I’d hardly ever spent time with and – to rub salt in the wounds – on a farm of all things, I too would have been trying to think of any excuse to get me out of it. Bertie quite understandably thinks that Long Bottom Farm will be; a) incredibly smelly; and b) really boring; but, it turns out, he hadn’t factored in the possibility of spending much of his time with an alien who calls himself ‘Nugget’ and has taken on the form of a chicken.

This is award-winning author, Jenny Pearson’s first novel for Barrington Stoke – a publisher that specialises in books that will entice reluctant readers of all kinds to dip into the world of fiction. She's fully embraced the idea and come up with a good-natured, laugh-out-loud story that, beneath the slapstick humour, has an important set of messages for young readers to engage with.

When Bertie arrives on the farm, his Uncle Brian and his farmhands have plenty of fun at his obvious discomfort – especially as it seems a chicken has decided to attach itself the boy and follow him wherever he goes. What they don’t know is that Bertie has heard the chicken speak! And, more than that, the chicken has revealed that he is in fact an alien from a planet called Nurgle 7 and his real name is Nugglynugglynoonahnoo – Nugget for short.

Using a metal detector, Bertie finds the small egg-shaped spaceship that brought Nugget to Earth and he discovers that Nurgles travel to other planets and are able to take on the form of the lifeform indigenous to the planet in order to blend in. Nugget seems to have mistaken chickens for the dominant life-form on Earth when he first arrived.

Nugget tells Bertie that he’s there to save the Earth from being destroyed by the Nurgle high command by discovering Earth’s most important resource and sending it back to Nurgle 7. Together Nugget and Bertie strike a solemn agreement to uncover Earth’s most precious resource – an agreement that can only be struck by the ritual bumping together of bottoms.

I’m not going to tell you any more about what Bertie and Nugget decide to do and the options they consider as contenders for being the most precious resource on the planet – you’ll have to read the book to find out.

The story is supplemented by delightful cartoon illustrations from Aleksei Bitskoff – a prolific children’s book illustrator who was born in Estonia but studied illustration in the UK.

The book is published in January 2023 and can be ordered from your nearest independent bookshop.

 

Terry Potter

January 2023